Chapter Text
There were six reasons Akaashi Keiji’s birthday party was hosted at Bokuto Koutarou’s home.
- Akaashi did not want to have a party.
- Akaashi did not have the space in his family’s tiny apartment to host anything.
- Akaashi’s parents were at a dig in Thailand.
- Bokuto insisted he have a party anyway.
- Bokuto’s mother and three sisters aggressively offered to cook.
- They were good cooks.
Akaashi did not like celebrating his own birthday in general. To begin with, he had very particular preferences in sweets that most confections rarely met. But that was only the icing on the cake.
Due to his parents’ well-respected but poorly-funded careers, he was used to spending December fifth alone. When he was too young to take care of himself, it was often spent in the company of his rather boring grandfather. Akaashi had always dreamed of having a grandfather with stories, who would share some kind of traditional knowledge, or even just take him fishing. But parenting an esteemed archaeologist seemed to be the man’s highest achievement in life. It had been all downhill from there. Akaashi’s only living grandparent had two interests: watching game shows and falling asleep under the kotatsu.
As a result, Akaashi’s birthdays were not really associated with pleasant memories. Not negative memories necessarily. Just neutral ones. A nod from his teacher came first. The reason she knew was thanks to the many gifts that the girls in his class had already piled on his desk. He kept a list of each item received, as well as its giver in order to return the gesture in the most platonic way possible. This was followed by an evening spent in the company of game shows and the snores of the most boring man in the world. Or, as of late, alone.
But now, sitting at the head of the Bokuto family table, surrounded by his teammates, Bokuto’s tiny father, his Amazonian mother, and his three voluptuous older sisters, not to mention the captain himself, Akaashi found himself out of his element. When a blazing cake the size of his head was shoved at his head, quiet panic was only natural. He had a reputation for being icy, and as such tried to avoid open flame.
“Akaaaaashi, you gotta make a wish after you blow them out!” Bokuto was leaning across the table so far that the candle flames danced in his eyes, turning them to molten metal. And while Akaashi found himself appreciating his teammate’s birthday fervor in a way that was soft, foreign, and somewhat unexpected, Bokuto should still have known that this level of spectacle was neither Akaashi’s preference, nor something he was entirely comfortable with.
Under such pressure, he blew out the candles. Then, as requested, made a wish.
I wish Bokuto-san understood the perspective of someone other than himself.
He smashed the alarm clock to pieces. It wasn’t in the right place, so he’d struggled to find it, and when he had, he’d hit the snooze much harder than he’d planned. Shards of plastic stuck in his hand and he could feel the warm trickle of blood across his palm.
Clumsily trying to discover what had happened by feel left him with shards in the other hand too. It hurt less than it could have, but is still hurt, the pain waking him much more quickly than normal. Enough to get him to sit up. Normally he lay in bed until the last alarm went off: the one he set on his phone across the room. Too awake now, he blearily picked at his more damaged palm. He quickly discovered that his fingers were swollen, thick and blunt, and he couldn’t pull out the plastic shards.
Was he having an allergic reaction? The consideration felt unnaturally frantic, buzzing in his brain, a bee stuck between two panes of widow glass. Moving on to the next thought, even something as simple as what to do next, was impossible. He held his hands up in front of his face, assuming an answer would calm him down.
He’d always scoffed at the axiom of “knowing something like the back of your hand.” Who gave such attention to their hands? As it turned out, he was someone who did. At least, enough to know without a moment’s hesitation that the hands waving in his line of sight were not his. They were broader and shorter and the skin color was much too pale.
He looked around in the dim light. The room was not his either.
A spike of panic more intense than he’d ever felt in his life rocketed through his entire existence.
Getting to his feet was a disaster. He put a small dent in the wall shoving himself to the edge of the enormous bed. Pushing to his feet actually ended with his face plastered to the floor. He struggled to stand, then crossed the room much more loudly than he intended. All to tell himself what he already knew
He reached his destination and anchored himself by the fingertips on the end of the low dresser. With a deep gasp for air, he lifted his head up to the mirror hanging on the wall. Enormous lamplight eyes blinked back at him, bright and gold even in the early morning light.
He didn’t mean to yell. He’d maybe yelled four times in his life.
This was the fifth.
“Kou!!!” a voice called in the next room, followed by two thumps of a fist against the wall, “Just because you insist on getting up at the ass-crack of dawn doesn’t mean the rest of us do!”
Akaashi ignored whatever sister it was in favor of running clunky, bloodied hands across Bokuto’s face. The foreign fingers grazed against stubble-lined angles. A completely alien sensation from both points of contact. Keiji’s own face was soft and smooth and round: much more so than he would have chosen for himself, but it was the hand he’d been dealt. He’d never touched Bokuto’s face to realize that he likely had to shave every few days. Never felt the sharp angles of his cheekbones and jaw, or the bushiness of his eyebrows.
It was unnerving to do so as Bokuto.
Profoundly upsetting, actually. Akaashi was shaking in a body that wasn’t his, and his mind was racing, every normal emotion enhanced exponentially. His brain was made of nothing but panic. Akaashi was not an anxious person; he was the cool head in times of turmoil. Trying to wrangle this inner identity with current physical and emotional reality made the situation even worse. What was he doing wrong? Why was he suddenly like this?
He didn’t hear the taps on the window until they shifted into the rattling slide of the sash being lifted. Seconds later, his own body awkwardly rolled inside the room and flopped, limbs akimbo, on the bed. He was wearing his Fukurodani tracksuit, and his hair was flat on one side. The bag Akaashi had meticulous packed the night before thudded across the floor.
“Akaashi?” his own voice asked, higher and louder and more expressive than he’d ever heard it. The rhythm of the words was unmistakable.
“Bokuto-san,” he croaked. Bokuto’s voice sounded so different as the one speaking it. Deeper, as though he were trying to seduce someone and coming close to actually succeeding.
“I sound so weird!” Bokuto gaped, the expression looking utterly ridiculous on Akaashi’s own face. “Do I always talk outta my nose?”
“Kou!” the sister on the other side of the wall groaned, “Look, I don’t care who you bring over at five in the morning but I don’t wanna hear it!”
Bokuto covered Akaashi’s mouth. Well, Akaashi’s hand covered Akaashi’s mouth with the sort of guilty, bewildered gesture that only Bokuto would use. Then it dropped.
“You’re bleeding!” he whisper-yelled. “Or, uh, I’m? bleeding? Akaaaaaashi, what’s going on?”
Akaashi couldn’t respond. He was trembling, his thoughts fluttering in an infuriating swarm. The pain in his hand was the only grounding thing in the room. The more he focused on it, the more he could organize the chaos in order to break down the situation into its constituent parts. But he couldn’t even do that very effectively. All signs just pointed to disaster.
They were neon signs, the kind that hummed distractingly.
“I,” he looked up, only to see his own face, peering down at him. They made eye contact for a single uncomfortable instant, then his own eyes turned to Bokuto’s hands.
“Did you break something?” long fingers reached out too far, jamming into the plastic instead of pulling it out.
“I smashed your alarm clock,” Akaashi hissed, the sound incredibly foreign and somewhat terrifying in Bokuto’s voice. “I apologize, but your body is very strong.”
“I know, right?” Bokuto looked up at him again, beaming despite the situation. Akaashi had never seen his eyes smile so much, let alone his mouth. “Well yours is super flexible! It was real easy to climb in the window. Ah… but it wasn’t so easy to climb the wall outside. You gotta work harder on arm day, Akaashi.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Now can we discuss the current situation?”
“Ah, yeah,” Bokuto made to pull his own body down to the floor as he sat, but just ended up flying backwards instead. “Akaaaaaaashi! If you wanna get that stuff out of your hands you gotta get down here. But wow! I’m like a tank.”
“Perhaps you’ll keep that in mind the next time you slap me on the back repeatedly,” Akaashi made to sit. Bokuto’s legs were longer and broader and much harder to fold, so he knelt instead. He tried not to notice the way Bokuto’s round ass was pressing against his heels, which only made him notice it more.
He was not that much smaller than Bokuto, but he looked like it from the current angle: slim and short and… delicate. Did he really look that delicate?? How embarrassing.
“Akaashi, can you gimme your hands? Or… my hands?”
“Please don’t make the injury worse, Bokuto-san.”
“I can’t help it if you have yaoi hands,” Bokuto snickered. Akaashi’s voice did not sound good snickering. “Look at em, they’re bigger than your face.” He proceeded to demonstrate.
“I don’t know what that means,” Bokuto’s voice didn’t adequately express the weariness Akaashi already felt.
“Oh! You know those manga for girls with the dudes getting it on with each other?”
“I am aware of what yaoi is.”
“Well, Sakura is super into them, and they all have freaking enormous hands. Like yours! No wonder you’re so good at setting, your fingers are so long!” He leaned over in Akaashi’s body to examine his own hands, which were resting on his thighs.
Akaashi would not have suspected that Bokuto would yank out the first plastic shards without so much as a warning. It was the sensible thing to do, and as such, seemed outside of Bokuto’s wheelhouse. The pain was sharp, perhaps because the body was so new to him. He cried out before he could control himself and Bokuto’s voice was so loud.
Apparently, that was the last straw.
In what sounded like four steps, Bokuto’s closest-in-age older sister slammed open the door.
“Kou, you know, I support the two of you in whatever you’re doing, just as long as you don’t do it when I’m trying to–GAH!”
Bokuto sat up in Akaashi’s body, and for the first time, Akaashi realized he was wearing nothing but underwear. Or Bokuto’s body was. And to the casual observer, there had been a head of dark hair directly in his groin.
“Just how horny are you two?” she muttered, turning to leave. “It’s so damn early for this…”
“Sayuri-neechan, come on!” Akaashi’s voice whined. “I told you, we’re not–”
Akaashi punched himself in the gut. The plastic stung much worse than before.
“Sorry!” he tried his best to sound like Bokuto while he held up his hands, “I uh, kinda hurt my hands and Akaashi was helping.”
His version of Bokuto was unfortunately very stilted.
“Oh,” Sayuri blinked, sleepy enough that the excuse made sense. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but she looked almost… disappointed. “Do you need a bandage or something?”
“Nah, I got it,” Akaashi’s voice groaned.
The instant the door clicked shut Akaashi leaned over Bokuto, who was still rolling on the floor. There were a lot of questions, for instance, why his sister had assumed they were the sort of friends who fellate each other. But at the moment there were more urgent things to worry about.
“We are making rules right now.”
It wasn’t right then. Akaashi dressed himself in Bokuto’s warmup gear, packed his uniform, and they had a silent, awkward breakfast before getting on the train. There was a park near Fukurodani that would be unoccupied so early in the morning. The location made it easy to get to school. It also took them away from Bokuto’s family, since Akaashi was not confident he could maintain character in front of them for an extended period of time.
They sat side by side on the swings in an awkward silence. Bokuto used his nervous energy to spin around, until he realized Akaashi’s body got motion sickness. Then he stopped and made a very unpleasant face that grew in intensity until it ended in a belch that echoed through the still morning. Because that was how Akaashi burped when he wasn’t doing his best to be quiet about it.
Neither of them commented.
“How’d this happen?” Bokuto asked tentatively, as though Akaashi was going to yell at him. When that didn’t immediately take place, he continued. “I mean we didn’t fall down the stairs together, or knock heads, or… I didn’t think those things were real anyway, to be honest.”
“I have no idea.”
It was a half lie. Because really. A birthday wish caused all this? Completely unfeasible.
“I will do my best to figure out the cause, as well as a way to reverse our situation. Until then, we must do the best we can to avoid detection. Reaching out to some kind of authority seems unwise.”
Bokuto leaned forward in his swing, looking excited and horrified at the prospect. “Cause otherwise they’ll cart us away to the looney bin or something? Or do weird tests like we’re aliens!”
“I have no idea, but I don’t want to find out.”
“Okay, okay then, so what are the rules? Like, I guess I gotta call everybody “–san” now, right? All keigo all the time.”
He said the honorific with the gravity of a person attending a funeral. Akaashi was offended for reasons he barely understood. The irritation itched more than normal, but he sighed it out heavily in an attempt to move on. “That’s preferable, but before we cover interacting with others, there are more essential considerations.”
Bokuto made a confused face which did something to Akaashi’s eyebrows he hadn’t thought possible.
He cleared Bokuto’s throat. “I do not care if you masturbate in my body, Bokuto-san. Feel free to do so, you have my extended consent.”
Akaashi hadn’t thought his vocal chords were capable of generating the mangled noise Bokuto made in reaction but, apparently, they were.
“As long as you don’t cause my genitals any damage, take any photos, or interact with other people, you can do whatever you want with them. Or the rest of my body. I don’t have any food allergies, or any other concerns of that nature, though I’d prefer you not make me sick.”
Bokuto was slowly folding Akaashi’s body in half.
“Does this disturb you?” Surprisingly, his voice did not crack.
Bokuto lifted Akaashi’s head while keeping his body folded. He was blushing from the crown of his head all the way down to his neck. “It’s just… a lot. I mean, why would you just not care, Aggasshee?”
Akaashi shrugged, hitting himself in the face with Boktuo’s bicep. “It’s not as though certain less glamorous bodily functions can be ignored. Also, because I trust that you won’t do anything strange. If my theory based on this morning’s experience is correct, our hormonal and chemical make-up has not shifted with our minds. In that case you will find yourself in… some discomfort if you don’t ejaculate at least once a day. It will be even more difficult to maintain the façade that you are me.”
There. The most humiliating aspect, his unfortunately high libido, was out of the way. The heat on the tips of his ears was almost unbearable, and he could feel it dusting across his cheeks. Ridiculous inner questions that he would normally just notice and brush away bounced around in his mind. “What if he thinks you’re a pervert?” “What if he tells Kuroo-san?” “What if he’s unimpressed?”
The last question was the most nonsensical, so of course it stuck the longest.
“Well uh…” Bokuto interrupted him, still beet red. “Same for me, I guess.” An idea struck him and he looked up, eyes dark with intensity. Akaashi’d never seen that look on himself before, and he felt a moment of irrational pride.
“You gotta take my meds,” Bokuto announced. “If you don’t take em it’ll get messy. Even if our brain hormone stuff didn’t do what you said, I’m pretty certain my body’ll go into withdrawal if you stop taking em for a while. After practice and before bed every day. There’s a plastic pill thing with the days on it, you just gotta eat a little when you take em.”
“Understood,” Akaashi nodded, feeling the long un-gelled strands of Bokuto’s hair slap against his face. “I suppose it goes without saying that our current situation has to remain a secret.”
“Really? But Kuroo, I mean… Kuroo-san could help!”
“I don’t want Kuroo-san’s help at the present time. And I doubt it would be of use anyway.”
“But what if it gets really bad?”
Akaashi sighed, “If that becomes the case, then he will be the first person we tell. Now, please explain to me the dynamic you have with your class and teachers, so I don’t come across as a lunatic. I will explain mine afterwards. We can discuss your family when it is less urgent.”
“Sure thing, Bokuto-san.”
What if he’s unimpressed? continued to rattle around in Akaashi’s brain throughout the entire conversation. He tried not to entertain what it might mean.
But strangely, he found that he couldn’t.